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The Prey Bible Written by Mark Sowden The Team Here is a list of known people that worked on and contributed to Prey’s development. Prey went through four iterations with the final game having too many people to really list here, though of course a link will be provided and any significant developers will be listed. It’s worth also adding that the years listed here are the known years at which that person either had their time allocated to Prey, or to a studio that was involved in the development of the game. (3D Realms) Mark Dochterman (1993­1996) Lead Engineer Michael Hadwin (1994­1996) Art Director Jim Dosé (1994­1996) Programmer Tom Hall (1995­1996) Lead Designer William Scarboro (1995­1998) Lead Programmer Stephen Hornback (1995­1998) Artist George Broussard (1995­2006) Producer Lee Jackson (1996­?) Sound Tom Pytel (1997­?) Programmer Scott McCabe (1997­?) Artist Allen Dilling (1997­1999) Animator Matt T. Wood (1997­2003) Level Designer Paul Schuytema (1997­1998) #Job Title# Project Lead, Producer ? David March (1998­2001) 3D Artist Timothy Wilson (2001­2006) Quality Assurance (Human Head) Michael Ryan (2002­2004) Level Designer Jason OConnell (2003­2007) Level Designer 1 Nicholas Taylor (2004­2010) Character Animator Raison Varner (2005­2006) Sound Designer Rich Whitehouse (2005­2006) Programmer Ed Lima (2005­2006) Audio Director Story As there were four incarnations of Prey it could be considered that there are four different alternative stories that were developed for the game. Sadly the information for the first incarnation of Prey is rather lacking so there isn’t much to share concerning the story for that. It’s also worth mentioning that the story for the game did not change a huge amount between Paul’s Schuytema vision of the game and the finished product, and various ideas were recycled during the games development from Tom Hall’s vision for the game such as the main character being a Native American and his abduction. Origin When Schuytema began working on the new story for the game he looked at books such as Larry Niven’s Ringworld for inspiration. This book had a huge impact on the story of the game. Talon Brave Sun During Schuytema’s lead on the game, the name of the main character was planned on being Talon Brave. This was a decision made by the development team of the game however both George Broussard and Scott Miller personally felt Tommy Hawk would be more appropriate (which became the main characters name in the final game). There was a lot of work being done towards making sure that Talon Brave was as true to the Native American traditions and spirit as possible and the team even had a Native American consultant. It had been stated later by Miller that the name “Brave” was actually a shortened version of his real name which was not to be revealed until the game had been released however he later let Talon’s full name slip which was revealed to be Talon Brave Sun. "The word 'talon' is a claw on a bird of prey. The word brave refers to the character's native American heritage, plus it has the double meaning of courage. Also, the name Brave is actually a shortened version of his real native American name which won't be revealed until the game's release." ­ Scott Miller, 1997 “[...] The name of your alter ego in Prey is Talon Brave. We all worked long and hard on this name, and we're pretty excited about it­it captures the feel and tone of our character very well.” ­ Paul Schuytema, April 8th 1997 2 Abduction As stated earlier the story changed considerably over the games development but there are various sources which give us an idea of how the story was planned to play out in the game and most of the story remained the same in the final game. Talon Brave was not like a character such as Duke Nukem who was a well known hero in the game world but he was similar to a character such as Gordon Freeman in that he was just a regular person living in the world before having to adapt to challenges faced before him. Unlike Gordon Freeman however, who spent the majority of his adventure fighting on his own planet in a world that was familiar to him and recognisable to the player, Talon was abducted to an alien ship completely unaware of where he was and what was going to happen next. The ship sent to destroy the Earth is known as the Trocara which is the home of four different alien species with the fourth mysterious species known as the Keepers. The ship has four “islands” that each race resides on with a large simulated sun at its centre acting as a nucleus. Unknown to Talon however is that the Trocara was responsible for the creation of Earth and after learning what their goal is, he realises he’s the only one that can save the planet. Technology During Prey’s development, between ‘97 and ‘98, Prey was using new methods that had not been put to use in games before, for example rather than using a more traditional method known as binary space partitioning for levels it instead made use of a somewhat new technique known as portal rendering which consisted of using either automatic or manually placed “portals” to split each sector from the other one and then displaying what was visible in each portal, almost acting as a window. Unlike traditional methods the Prey team found that this gave them a huge advantage over the level of detail they could add into their levels compared to games such as Quake, because unlike that engine which had used BSP (binary space partitioning) for its levels which had to be mostly precomputed and was more difficult to optimise, the level designers could have more control over how they could optimise their levels. Because of the speed of this system, each part of the world in Prey was treated as an individual object which could be moved dynamically at anytime. There’s a bit of a split in­regards to the name of Prey’s engine. One source suggests that the engine was named “PreyTech” however it’s also possible that the engine was intended to be called “PreyOS” which is seen to be used in the 1998 E3 demonstration of the game and is mentioned various times by other developers, but this was supposedly just a buzzword created to help hype the game and the technology behind it. The graphics API that was used for the engine, unlike most games at the time, was the Glide API which was an API specifically tailored towards 3dfx cards which were popular at the time. During most of development there was quite some uncertainty internally whether this decision was right or not. 3 Here’s a list of known features... ● 3dfx Glide renderer. ● Advanced skeletal animation using kinematics. ● Full 16­bit coloured lighting with radiosity. ● Coloured dynamic lights including full gouraud shading for models. ● Supported Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. ● Portal­based rendering engine. ○ Fully dynamic environments. ○ Sector­based ([a] ­> [c] ­> [b]). ○ Reflections. ○ Portals. ● Heavily modified UnrealScript integration referred to as “PreyScript”. Artificial Intelligence No working AI was ever shown in the game with most sequences seen in videos being completely scripted. Late in the Prey’s development during ‘98, work was being done towards creating an AI system that could take in recorded movements and actions of players, and then use it to help influence its decisions within the game world, but this work was never finalised before the game was cancelled. Preditor Preditor was Prey’s level editing program which at the time of development had been hailed as an incredibly intuitive and powerful editor that allowed a level designer to work on their level in a number of different configurations to suit their needs. Similarly to Unreal’s editor, Prey displayed an in­engine preview of the level allowing level designers to quickly iterate their maps quicker than any other level editors at the time. “Preditor at a base level was one of the best editors I've ever used. The strength of Preditor was that you could do everything in the 3d window without having to go to any 2d windows unless you were moving around lots of large objects at once. SketchUp is very close to Preditor in the way you created geometry, but Preditor was much cleaner and faster to build with, I think.” ­ Matt T. Wood, January 21st 2013 Soundtrack In November of 1997 it was announced by 3D Realms that KMFDM would be working on the soundtrack for Prey while Lee Jackson would be tasked with creating ambient tracks for use in the game. Only one song has been released; a track created by KMFDM titled “Missing Time” which had been finalised when the group got back together as MDFMK and released for Heavy Metal 2000. It’s been believed for a long time that the music used in Prey’s 1998 E3 trailer was created by KMFDM however one of the people who were part of that band have recently disputed this fact, so it 4 is now believed that the track used in the ‘98 trailer was in­fact composed by Lee Jackson. Development Timeline 1995 ● February ○ [17th] Rise of the Triad is released by 3D Realms. ● July ○ Work on Prey begins. ● October ○ The Prey engine is up and running for the first time. 1996 ● ? ○ 3D Realms teams up with 3DFX to add Glide support (hardware rendering) for the Prey engine.

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